3rd SUNDAY OF LENT (A)

A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

Jn 4:5-42

v. 6. Jacob's well was there. Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well. It was about noon.

The meaning of the Greek words is that Jesus was so tired that he sat down without selecting any special place to sit. This is significant because John among the evangelists emphasizes the divinity of Jesus and yet he is not afraid to record his human limitation (11:33. 35. 38; 19:28).

v. 7. A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, "Give me a drink."

Obviously she was not from Sychar. This underlines her position as the repre-sentative Samaritan just as Nicodemus had been the representative Jew.

v. 9. The Samaritan woman said to him, "How can you, a Jew, ask me, a Sama-ritan woman, for a drink?" (For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans.)

The sentence “For Jews use nothing in common with Samaritans” may either be a comment of the evangelist in which case the parenthesis would be correct. It may, however, be a part of the woman’s reply to Jesus, in which case, it should be within the quotation marks.

v. 10. Jesus answered and said to her, "If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him and he would have given you living water."

The gift of God can be taken to mean the “living water” soon to be mentioned. But in the OT it is a metaphor for the help given by God to men. It is a more common metaphor in Rabbinic writings. There it is used for the Torah (Law of God). If this is so, then the sense of Jesus’ reply would be: If only she (and the Samaritans) understood the Torah, then they would realize who Jesus was and so they would come to him for living water which he alone could give.

v. 11. (The woman) said to him, "Sir, you do not even have a bucket and the cis-tern is deep; where then can you get this living water?

“Sir” is a term of respect. This already indicates that the woman is already on her way to being enlightened as to the true identity of Jesus.

In v. 6 the word for “well” may also be translated as “spring”. Here it is really “cistern” because the water here is not living (that is, not fresh) as the water coming from a mountain stream. The religion of Samaria is like the water stored in a cistern.

v. 12. Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us this cistern and drank from it himself with his children and his flocks?"

The word used for “flock” can also mean “slaves”. The point is that what Jacob left was sufficient for freemen, for slaves and beasts. Can Jesus improve on that? The answer is yes. The salvation brought by Jesus is sufficient for the world.

v. 13. Jesus answered and said to her, "Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again."

Jesus contrasts the drink that can only quench the thirst for a short time and then needs to be repeated with the drink which drunk only once quenches all thirst for good. This reminds us of the OT sacrifice which needs to be repeated daily and the sacrifice of Christ (NT) which was offered only once and yet is efficacious always and everywhere.

v. 15. The woman said to him, "Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water."

The woman does not yet fully understand Jesus; but it seems equally clear that she realizes that the conversation is moving to places where her own personal and her national religious life will be challenged.

v. 16. Jesus said to her, "Go call your husband and come back."

First, she will have to bring her husband and then from Christ she will be able to draw living water. A commentator suggests that Jesus was actually speaking at two levels. He was not only thinking about the man she was cohabiting with. He was also talking about her Samaritan religion (= husband). The woman, of course, understood that Jesus was only speaking about her husband.

v. 17. The woman answered and said to him, "I do not have a husband." Jesus answered her, "You are right in saying, 'I do not have a husband.'

The woman tries to evade the incursion of Jesus into her private life by saying she has no husband. But Jesus persists in talking about her husband. Of course, he also had the Samaritan religion in mind. He asserts that her religion is empty because it is not wedded to the one true God.

v. 19. The woman said to him, "Sir, I can see that you are a prophet."

The supernatural knowledge of Jesus leads her to conclude that he was a prophet. Now it was the duty of the prophet to denounce any adultery on the part of God’s people. And she felt that it was to this that the conversation what was leading to.

Also she might be suspecting that Jesus was no ordinary prophet. Jesus could be THE prophet that Dt 18:15 was talking about.

v. 20. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem."

The mountain cannot but be Gerizim. At the same time, dialog cannot be taking place on that mountain. No doubt John had in mind the symbolic character of the conversation taking place between Jesus and the woman.

v. 21. Jesus said to her, "Believe me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.

Jesus already foresees that some Samaritans will come to worship the Father and these like some of the Jews will do it through Jesus himself.

v. 22. You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews.

The Samaritans accepted the Pentateuch but without they remain ignorant for they are without the divine commentary written on the recorded history of Israel and without the writings of her inspired religious writers.

v. 23. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship him.

A scholar rephrases “in spirit and truth” into “in Spirit which is the truth.” Truth as used by John often means “reality”.

The Spirit is not some vague spirituality. He is the power that filled and pos-sessed Christ and wrought the works of God in him.

v. 24. God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth."

God is not just one of the beings that inhabit the spirit world. He is not just one member of the clan of spirits.

v. 25. The woman said to him, "I know that the Messiah is coming, the one called the Anointed; when he comes, he will tell us everything."

“He will tell us everything” may be re-worded as “He will reveal all things by his teaching of the truth”.

v.40. When the Samaritans came to him, they invited him to stay with them; and he stayed there two days.

Testimony (of the woman) is adequate to bring men to Christ. But this must give way to personal experience and communion with the Lord.

The Jesus whom men met in Galilee, Samaria and Judea is the same as the risen Lord that men can meet in any time or place. And it is the concern of John, the synoptics and St. Paul and the rest of the NT writers to affirm that the this Jesus of history is the same as the Christ of faith.

v. 42. And they said to the woman, "We no longer believe because of your word; for we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world."

The universal mission of Jesus is once again affirmed as it was affirmed in the encounter of Jesus with Nicodemus (Jn 3:16).